SUMMARY of Saint John by Max Aub

San Juan is a novel by the well-known Spanish author Max Aub, of French origin. After the civil war, the author had to go into exile in Mexico to live and that is where he wrote his first tragedy, which is what we will talk about in this article. San Juan It is a work that speaks of the whole society in common, so it does not have to be interpreted as a story without more, but it has to be understood as your personal story.

In this lesson from a TEACHER we are going to make you a summary of San Juan of Max Aub and the characters that make the story make sense.

We start this summary of San Juan by Max Aub so that you know his argument and the story that is told to us.

San Juan is a tragedy that was written in a moment of transition of the author, in which the artist had passed through the avant-garde theater and the theater of Circumstances. They were stages of much learning that allowed him to his works matured a lot in a short time.

The play begins its action on a ship that had once been used to transport cattle, but is now

loaded crew and its mission is to reach the port to unload all these sailors. The vast majority of the crew of the San Juan ship is Jewish population fleeing the Nazi horror. These sailors are waiting in front of a port in Asia Minor, for the captain to receive authorization to dock the ship and go down to its freedom.

San Juan by Max Aub is divided into three acts and has three main settings: the hold, the bridge and the deck. Described with a very realistic precision and referring to the ships of the 1938 era. The story happens in two days: the first act takes place at two in the afternoon of the first day, the second act, at nine in the evening of the same day, and the third, in the last moments of sunset the following day.

The ship's crew is made up of more than 800 people, They become the protagonists of the story. The work will only be represented by 40 characters of different ages who work on the central conflict in a choral way. The problem over which they fight and argue is the liberal nations' refusal to authorize the docking of the San Juan in no port.

The plot of the story moves between the conflicts that the characters have for their opposing ideas, the lack of solidarity that is created when sailors live in extreme conditions, religious ideas or the cowardice of certain characters to face the authorities.

When the night of the first day arrives, a group of young communistsThey decide to abandon ship and swim to port. His idea was to try to reach Spain to start fighting with the republican army, against the regime. Before leaving, the leader of this group of brave men makes a speech in which he encourages them to continue fighting for their ideals:

"Comrades, we are wasting time miserably aboard this heap of old iron when in other parts of the world there is effective fighting. We have prepared our march. On land they wait for us"

The second night, while the other sailors were still waiting for authorization and the young communists had already fled, the storm came. The ship was in the middle of a storm and began to sink, in the same way that the intentions of the rulers of the nearby town to help sank.

The NO activity of the authorities by not authorizing the robbery of the ship, he caused 800 people aboard the San Juan to drown that same night. His attempt to escape to a better world, to a new opportunity, was cut short by a government that, once again, decided not to act.

These speeches still make it into conversations today, because there are still too many "San Juanes" who are not allowed to dock in a safe port. They are made to wait for an authorization that will never come and will only bring about the end of their existence.

Thus we end this summary of San Juan by Max Aub, one of the author's best known and relevant works.

The San Juan ship carries about 800 people, most of them of Jewish origin, but of whom only have active presence in the work 40 characters, organized as follows:

• Young: Efraím, Carlos, Leva, Ezequiel, Raquel, Sonia, Mine, Isaac, Young 1st and Young 2nd.
• Old: the rabbi, Guedel, Chene, Boris, Bernheim, Simón, Weissmann, Abraham, Moses, Old 1st, Old 2nd, Lázaro, Esther, Isabel, Lía, Sara, Ruth, mother of Luisa.
• Those on board: The Captain, 1st Officer, 2nd Officer, the Doctor, the Chief Engineer, 1st Sailor, 2nd Sailor.

The work is choral, which is why none of the characters stands out from the other, but instead they all work as a team to give a sense of a collective, of society.

The first thing that draws attention when analyzing the characters in the play is the amount of people that are stuck in the boat. This fact leads us to think that Max Aub's goal was to treat all sailors Together, like a great choir raising its voice.

The work explains the professions of each of the ship's crew. In this way, the general set of characters becomes something concrete and personal allowing them to be more human than ever:

• six accountants
• one hundred and forty commercials
• fifty three lawyers
• three rabbis
• twenty farmers
• hundred and something dependent on commerce
• three stage directors
• six journalists
• two hundred old men and women who can no longer with their soul
• thirty five children

This shows us that Max Aub wanted to embark on the San Juan to all mankind, to people of different types. Among the crew you can find people of all ages, both genders and all professions represented. In other words, Max Aub is telling us that the ship's crew we are humanity.

In addition, in the work it is made explicit several times that on the ship they travel normal people", as if to say that anyone could be on the ship. They have not been chosen for anything in particular, but because they are ordinary people, that is, anyone could be in the same situation.

This fact fulfills a very interesting function with regard to reading, since the spectator feels from the first minute that this group of people are completely innocent and do not constitute any real threat to no one. Even he feels identified with the crowd on board the San Juan. The spectator is another character.

The only common characteristic that most sailors have is that they they are jewish. But they are not even Jews of the same type. To begin with, different nationalities come together on the ship, because when they do the money accounts, each one expresses the amount in the currency of your country. Also, some of the Jews on the ship are racial, but others are simply religious.

Even on the ship we can find a Jew who looks like a German: blond, tall, strong, white, etc. Therefore, we can deduce that Max Aub doesn't delve into any of the characters to give it a specific weight in the work or a specific personality, but rather she works with society as a whole, with a choral conversation. But, on the other hand, it takes into account the details of each of the characters to make them unique: her nationality, her religion, her trade, her age, etc.

The characters in the play are shown, on certain occasions, contradictory, since they do not always act as victims. Sometimes, some of the characters even act as executioners, siding with their enemies and thinking as they do.

For example, at the moment in which Sonia, the Jewish girl and Officer 1 maintain a love relationship, the parents categorically forbid the girl to marry a heretic again. That is, at that moment, the parents are acting just like the nazis, judging people by their religion and prohibiting the freedom of individuals.

The girl's mother states in one of her replicas:

"never! Do you hear it? Never! We will never consent to mingle with heretics."

Although none of the characters in the work stands out for his leading role, there are certain moments that mark the reader more. So we're going to show you some of the moments through these 3 characters of San Juan by Max Aub.

bernheim

He is a rich banker that he considers his fellow travelers as "trash". Because he has more money than the other characters, he believes that he should have a privileged place on the ship. In his dialogues he expresses it this way:

"But don't you think it's a crime that I, with the money I have, have to lurch around these shores like all these poor little ones who have nowhere to drop dead?"

the doctor

The doctor is another of the main characters in San Juan. Allows himself to be bribed by Bernheim, but not because he believes in the ideals of the rich man, but because he wants to achieve his own goals. He says it like this in his dialogues:

“Thirteen years of your barcucho, Captain, thirteen years of manure, horses to the right, horses to the left, horses across the Black Sea, horses across the Dardanelles...horses, horses! I have been more a veterinarian than a doctor aboard your indecent boat. And even now, that it's been more than six months since a horse has set foot in the cellar of your filthy gate, all of this smells like a horse, like the excrement of 200,000 horses... And now that the possibility of getting rid of all this has arrived, like a drop from the sky...”

Captain

The captain is the character who is portrayed in the most positive light throughout the play. His behavior throughout the tragedy is one of enormous uprightness and moral integrity. This is how he shows it in his dialogues:

"I wouldn't mind if not one but all disembarked. You know I've done my best. But what I am not willing to do, for all the gold in the world, is that only one disembark, and that one, moreover, be the richest of the passengers"

We hope that this article has been able to help you to understand a little better the summary of the work of Saint John, by Max Aub and how he treats the characters in a choral way. If you are interested in continuing to discover more books, do not hesitate to consult our reading section.